We appreciate the enormous support that our ABestWeb community has experienced over the many years it has served its members and sponsors. We have decided to exit this business and have placed the property up for sale and we are actively entertaining interest.

In the meantime, community members will be able to read but not post to ABestWeb beginning on Jan. 18.

We want to thank you for your numerous contributions and your ongoing support. If you have any questions, please let us know.

I was able to get the ICDSoft.com site and see they are using SAVVIS but they have no status available.

Edit:

Jan 2 2007 10:14 EST
Currently, there are connectivity problems within the network of our US upstream provider - SAVVIS, and all servers in our US datacenter cannot be reached.

Please be advised that the SAVVIS data center facility team has reported that the Boston data center is isolated due to a circuit related issue. At this time equipment is not reachable. SAVVIS is working with the local Telco vendor to restore connectivity. An estimated time of resolution is unknown at this time. An update for this incident will be published here within 2 hours;

The network outage at the SAVVIS datacenter continued for about 6 hours.

Besides ICDSoft, among the affected companies were Lycos Mail / Tripod, the websites of the magazines CIO and CSO - basically everyone whose equipment is in Savvis datacenter in Boston.

It seems that both main and backup communication lines of the datacenter went down in a short period of time. Still there is no official information from Savvis about the cause of the problem, a full report from them is expected in the next few days.

Savvis is one of the largest providers in the US and they have performed very well in the last few years (we have equipment there since 2003). This is the first major issue we experienced with them. Unfortunately, it was quite severe and affected many of our customers.

We apologize to all our customers, whose sites were down during the outage.

We will wait for the report from Savvis, so that we consider our options.

We have a technology for moving whole shared-hosting servers between datacenters, with 0% downtime for our users during the move. Unless we receive from Savvis Corp a very convincing plan what will be done to prevent similar issues and clear proofs about the reliability of their infrastructure, we are ready to take the hard decision to move all our equipment elsewhere.

We will check this thread regularly and post further updates, when there is additional information available.

According to the report from Savvis, the outage was caused by failures in two of their major backbone lines to Boston. The first line went down on Dec 31, and Savvis did not manage do fix their hardware until Jan 2, when the second line failed. Also, Savvis claim that there was an additional, third failure - of a backbone router. All these caused the isolation of the datacenter.

The management of Savvis abided to connect their Boston datacenter with two more backbone lines - one to be installed immediately, and another within three months. Also, we are revising with them their failover procedures.

One of the reasons we chose this datacenter (it belonged to Cable & Wireless back in 2003 when we started placing servers there), were the advertised datacenter specifications and reliability. When Savvis acquired the US hosting network of CW in 2004, they assured as that the Boston facility will be developed as a high-end colocation and managed-hosting datacenter. We are paying quite high prices on bandwidth/space there, just because we thought that we are buying more reliability.

According to information from Savvis from yesterday, the first line to be installed is already in place. Another third-party provider backup line is available as well.

We will monitor Savvis actions closely by requiring information from them regularly. If they fail to deliver what they promised within the specified timeframe, we are ready to change colocation providers.